Authors: Thomas Pynchon
“Sure. For how long?”
“It won’t last. Of course not. But for a few months . . . perhaps there’ll be peace
by the autumn—
discúlpeme
, the spring, I still haven’t got used to your hemisphere—for a moment of spring,
perhaps. . . .”
“Yeah but—what’re you gonna do, take over land and try to hold it? They’ll run you
right off, podner.”
“No. Taking land is building more fences. We want to leave it open. We want it to
grow, to change. In the openness of the German Zone, our hope is limitless.” Then,
as if struck on the forehead, a sudden fast glance, not at the door, but
up at the ceiling
— “So is our danger.”
The U-boat right now is cruising around somewhere off of Spain, staying submerged
for much of the day, spending nights on the surface to charge batteries, sneaking
in now and then to refuel. Squalidozzi won’t go into the fueling arrangements in much
detail, but there are apparently connections of many years’ standing with the Republican
underground—a community of grace, a gift of persistence. . . . Squalidozzi is in Zürich
now contacting governments that might be willing, for any number of reasons, to assist
his anarchism-in-exile. He must get a message to Geneva by tomorrow: from there word
is relayed to Spain and the submarine. But there are Peronist agents here in Zürich.
He is being watched. He can’t risk betraying the contact in Geneva.
“I can help you out,” Slothrop licking off his fingers, “but I’m short of cash and—”
Squalidozzi names a sum that will pay off Mario Schweitar and keep Slothrop fed for
months to come.
“Half in front and I’m on the way.”
The Argentine hands over message, addresses, money, and springs for the check. They
arrange to meet at the Kronenhalle in three days. “Good luck.”
“You too.”
A last sad look from Squalidozzi alone at his table. A toss of forelock, a fading
of light.
The plane is a battered DC-3, chosen for its affinity for moonlight, the kind expression
on its windowed face, its darkness inside and outside. He wakes up curled among the
cargo, metal darkness, engine vibration through his bones . . . red light filtering
very faint back through a bulkhead from up forward. He crawls to a tiny window and
looks out. Alps in the moonlight. Kind of small ones, though, not as spectacular as
he figured on. Oh, well. . . . He settles back down on a soft excelsior bed, lighting
up one of Squalidozzi’s corktips thinking, Jeepers, not bad, guys just jump in the
airplane, go where they want . . . why stop at Geneva? Sure, what about—well, that
Spain? no wait, they’re Fascists. South Sea Islands! hmm. Full of Japs and GIs. Well
Africa’s the Dark Continent, nothing
there
but natives, elephants, ’n’ that Spencer Tracy. . . .
“There’s nowhere to go, Slothrop, nowhere.” The figure is huddled against a crate,
and shivering. Slothrop squints through the weak red light. It is the well-known frontispiece
face of insouciant adventurer Richard Halliburton: but strangely altered. Down both
the man’s cheeks runs a terrible rash, palimpsested over older pockmarks, in whose
symmetry Slothrop, had he a medical eye, could have read drug reaction. Richard Halliburton’s
jodhpurs are torn and soiled, his bright hair greasy now and hanging. He appears to
be weeping silently, bending, a failed angel, over all these second-rate Alps, over
all the night skiers far below, out on the slopes, crisscrossing industriously, purifying
and perfecting their Fascist ideal of Action, Action, Action, once his own shining
reason for being. No more. No more.
Slothrop reaches, puts the cigarette out on the deck. How easy these angel-white wood
shavings can go up. Lie here in this rattling and wrenched airplane, lie still as
you can, damn fool, yup they’ve conned you—conned you again. Richard Halliburton,
Lowell Thomas, Rover and Motor Boys, jaundiced stacks of
National Geographic
s up in Hogan’s room must’ve all lied to him, and there was no one then, not even
a colonial ghost in the attic, to tell him different. . . .
Bump, skid, slew, pancake landing, fucking washouts from kite-flying school, gray
Swiss dawn light through little windows and every joint, muscle, and bone in Slothrop
is sore. It’s time to punch back in.
He gets off of the plane without incident, mingling into a yawning, sour flock of
early passengers, delivery agents, airfield workers. Cointrin in the early morning.
Shocking green hills one side, brown city on the other. Pavements are slick and wet.
Clouds blow slowly in the sky. Mont Blanc sez hi, lake sez howdy too, Slothrop buys
20 cigarettes and a local paper, asks directions, gets in a tram that comes and with
cold air through doors and windows to wake him up goes rolling into the City of Peace.
He’s to meet his Argentine contact at the Café l’Éclipse, well off the trolley lines,
down a cobblestone street and into a tiny square surrounded by vegetable and fruit
stalls under beige awnings, shops, other cafés, window-boxes, clean hosed sidewalks.
Dogs go running in and out of the alleys. Slothrop sits with coffee, croissants, and
newspaper. Presently the overcast burns off. The sun throws shadows across the square
nearly to where he’s sitting with all antennas out. Nobody seems to be watching. He
waits. Shadows retreat, sun climbs then begins to fall, at last his man shows up,
exactly as described: suit of Buenos Aires daytime black, mustache, goldrim glasses,
and whistling an old tango by Juan d’Arienzo. Slothrop makes a show of searching all
his pockets, comes up with the foreign bill Squalidozzi told him to use: frowns at
it, gets up, goes over.
Como no, señor
, no problem changing a 50-peso note—offering a seat, coming out with currency, notebooks,
cards, pretty soon the tabletop’s littered with pieces of paper that eventually get
sorted back into pockets so that the man has Squalidozzi’s message and Slothrop has
one to bring back to Squalidozzi. And that’s that.
Back to Zürich on an afternoon train, sleeping most of the way. He gets off at Schlieren,
some ungodly dark hour, just in case They’re watching the Bahnhof in town, hitches
a ride in as far as the St. Peterhofstatt. Its great clock hangs over him and empty
acres of streets in what he now reads as dumb malignity. It connects to Ivy League
quadrangles in his distant youth, clock-towers lit so dim the hour could never be
read, and a temptation, never so strong though as now, to surrender to the darkening
year, to embrace what he can of real terror to the hour without a name (unless it’s . . .
no . . . NO . . .): it was vanity, vanity as his Puritan forerunners had known it,
bones and heart alert to Nothing, Nothing underneath the college saxophones melding
sweetly, white blazers lipsticked about the lapels, smoke from nervous Fatimas, Castile
soap vaporizing off of shining hair, and mint kisses, and dewed carnations. It was
being come for just before dawn by pranksters younger than he, dragged from bed, blindfolded,
Hey Reinhardt, led out into the autumnal cold, shadows and leaves underfoot, and the
moment then of doubt, the real possibility that they are something else—that none
of it was real before this moment: only elaborate theatre to fool you. But now the
screen has gone dark, and there is absolutely no more time left. The agents are here
for you at last. . . .
What better place than Zürich to find vanity again? It’s Reformation country, Zwingli’s
town, the man at the end of the encyclopedia, and stone reminders are everywhere.
Spies and big business, in their element, move tirelessly among the grave markers.
Be assured there are ex-young men, here in this very city, faces Slothrop used to
pass in the quads, who got initiated at Harvard into the Puritan Mysteries: who took
oaths in dead earnest to respect and to act always in the name of
Vanitas
, Emptiness, their ruler . . . who now according to life-plan such-and-such have come
here to Switzerland to work for Allen Dulles and his “intelligence” network, which
operates these days under the title “Office of Strategic Services.” But to initiates
OSS is also a secret acronym: as a mantra for times of immediate crisis they have
been taught to speak inwardly
oss
. . .
oss
, the late, corrupt, Dark-age Latin word for bone. . . .
Next day, when Slothrop meets Mario Schweitar at the Sträggeli to front him half his
fee, he asks also for the location of Jamf’s grave. And that’s where they arrange
to close the deal, up in the mountains.
Squalidozzi doesn’t show up at the Kronenhalle, or the Odeon, or anyplace Slothrop
will think to look in the days that follow. Disappearances, in Zürich, are not unheard
of. But Slothrop will keep going back, just in case. The message is in Spanish, he
can’t make out more than a word or two, but he’ll hold on to it, there might be a
chance to pass it on. And, well, the anarchist persuasion appeals to him a little.
Back when Shays fought the federal troops across Massachusetts, there were Slothrop
Regulators patrolling Berkshire for the rebels, wearing sprigs of hemlock in their
hats so you could tell them from the Government soldiers. Federals stuck a tatter
of white paper in theirs. Slothrops in those days were not yet so much involved with
paper, and the wholesale slaughtering of trees. They were still for the living green,
against the dead white. Later they lost, or traded away, knowledge of which side they’d
been on. Tyrone here has inherited most of their bland ignorance on the subject.
Back behind him now, wind blows through Jamf’s crypt. Slothrop’s been camped here
these past few nights, nearly out of money, waiting for word from Schweitar. Out of
the wind, huddled inside a couple of Swiss army blankets he managed to promote, he’s
even been able to sleep. Right on top of Mister Imipolex. The first night he was afraid
to fall asleep, afraid of a visit from Jamf, whose German-scientist mind would be
battered by Death to only the most brute reflexes, no way to appeal to the dumb and
grinning evil of the shell that was left . . . voices twittering with moonlight around
his image, as step by step he, It, the Repressed, approaches. . . .
waitaminute
up out of sleep, face naked, turning to the foreign gravestones,
the what? what was it . . .
back again, almost to it, up again . . . up, and back, that way, most of the early
night.
There’s no visit. It seems Jamf is only dead. Slothrop woke next morning feeling,
in spite of an empty stomach and a runny nose, better than he had in months. Seemed
like he’d passed a test, not somebody else’s test, but one of his own, for a change.
The city below him, bathed now in a partial light, is a necropolis of church spires
and weathercocks, white castle-keep towers, broad buildings with mansard roofs and
windows glimmering by thousands. This forenoon the mountains are as translucent as
ice. Later in the day they will be blue heaps of wrinkled satin. The lake is mirror-smooth
but mountains and houses reflected down there remain strangely blurred, with edges
fine and combed as rain: a dream of Atlantis, of the Suggenthal. Toy villages, desolate
city of painted alabaster. . . . Slothrop hunkers down here in the cold curve of a
mountain trail, packing and lobbing idle snowballs, not much to do around here but
smoke the last butt of what for all he knows is the last Lucky Strike in all Switzerland. . . .
Footfalls down the trail. Clinking galoshes. It is Mario Schweitar’s delivery boy,
with a big fat envelope. Slothrop pays him, chisels a cigarette and some matches,
and they part. Back at the crypt Slothrop relights a small pile of kindling and pine
boughs, warms up his hands, and begins to thumb through the data. The absence of Jamf
surrounds him like an odor, one he knows but can’t quite name, an aura that threatens
to go epileptic any second. The information is here—not as much as he wanted (aw,
how much was that?) but more than he hoped, being one of those practical Yankees.
In the weeks ahead, in those very few moments he’ll be allowed to wallow in his past,
he may even have time to wish he hadn’t read any of it. . . .
• • • • • • •
Mr. Pointsman has decided to spend Whitsun by the sea. Feeling a bit megalo these
days, nothing to worry about really, never gets worse than, oh perhaps the impression,
whilst zooming along through the corridors of “The White Visitation,” that all the
others seem to be frozen in attitudes of unmistakable parkinsonism, with himself the
only alert, unpalsied one remaining. It is peacetime again now, no room for the pigeons
in Trafalgar Square on V-E Night, everyone at the facility that day mad drunk and
hugging and kissing, except for the Blavatskian wing of Psi Section, who were off
on a White Lotos Day pilgrimage to 19 Avenue Road, St. John’s Wood.
Now there’s time again for holidays. Though Pointsman does feel a certain obligation
to go relax, there is also, of course, The Crisis. A leader must show self-possession,
up to and including a holiday mood, in the midst of Crisis.
There’s now been no word of Slothrop for nearly a month, since the fumbling asses
in military intelligence lost him in Zürich. Pointsman is a bit browned-off with the
Firm. His clever strategy appears to’ve failed. In first discussions with Clive Mossmoon
and the others, it seemed foolproof: to let Slothrop escape from the Casino Hermann
Goering, and then rely on Secret Service to keep him under surveillance instead of
PISCES. An economy move. The surveillance bill is the most excruciating thorn in the
crown of funding problems he seems condemned to wear for the duration of this project.
Damned funding is going to be his downfall, if Slothrop doesn’t drive him insane first.
Pointsman has blundered. Hasn’t even the Tennysonian comfort of saying “someone” has
blundered. No, it was he and he alone who authorized the Anglo-American team of Harvey
Speed and Floyd Perdoo to investigate a random sample of Slothropian sex adventures.
Budget was available, and what harm could it do? They went off practically
skipping
, obsessive as Munchkins, out into the erotic Poisson. Don Giovanni’s map of Europe—640
in Italy, 231 in Germany, 100 in France, 91 in Turkey
but
, but, but—in Spain! in Spain, 1003!—is Slothrop’s map of London, and the two gumshoes
become so infected with the prevailing fondness out here for mindless pleasures that
they presently are passing whole afternoons sitting out in restaurant gardens dawdling
over chrysanthemum salads and mutton casseroles, or larking at the fruit monger’s—“Hey
Speed, look,
canteloupes!
I haven’t seen one of them since the Third Term—wow, smell this one, it’s beautiful!
Say, how about a canteloupe, Speed? Huh? Come on.”